Ballade of Worldly Wealth Explicitation

English 4

Andrew Lang

Explicitation of people "Ballade of Worldly Wealth"

Meaning of money in poem>?

Ballade of Worldly Wealth Explicitation

It is said that people who want money will never get enough of money. This poem, “Ballade of Worldly Wealth” is about money, and how in the end it is the core of evil. Andrew Lang-the author- wrote this ballad as if he were a Roman Catholic church man in the 14th century. In reality, he is a clergyman who wrote this poem in the late 1800s. The subject of the poem was money, and Lang was addressing the public. The poem is a analytical, judgmental, and truthful view of our world.

The poem is a didactic one, and the tone/mood was negative and sad. The form of the poem is a ballad which has eight lines in each stanza, and there are three stanzas in total. The lines are organized in a ABABBCBC fashion, with a rhyme pattern. In the first stanza, money is spoken about in terms of the way people can be tricked with it. For the second stanza, money is talked about money in the way of enjoyment. For example, the "festival", and the "ladies". In third and last stanza, it is talked about how money can infiltrate and corrupt even the religious. This whole poem is based on life in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

A ballade is complex, and there is parallel construction, end rhyming scheme, and a rhetorical opposing words. With parallel construction, there is a pattern where each of the endings end with the vowel sounds "all","ow", or "ice". The “all” sounds is present in lines 1,3,9,11,17 and 19 with words such as: wall, all, festival, tall, stall and Cardinal. For sentences 6,8,14,16,22,and 24 the sound "ow" is present in the words blow, flow, show, low, snow, etc. And for lines 2,4,5,7,10,12,13,15,18,20,21, and 23 the sound "ice" is present at the end with endings lies, eye, and Paradise. So this is the pattern ABABBCBC, or vowel pattern "all","ow","all","ow","ow","ice,""ow","ice". And within this pattern, there is rhetoric pattern where every other line rhymes. For instance, “Money wins the priest his stall...Red hats for the Cardinal.” (Lang) This pattern creates rhythm and meter within the poem to make it sound smooth on the tongue.

Part of the poem, for example, "taketh" and "maketh" are opposite construction of words. Another example of this is "to throw" and "can strow". Also, "ebb" and "flow", and then "to" and fro". This is called a "rhetorical pattern", and the purpose of rhetorical pattern is to show that money has a lot of power. It shows